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18 Years of Brain Mush

18 Years of Brain Mush

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Ha! I was right! …

Ha! I was right! Back when I was working for Borders.com, I kept a close eye on the few domains that were being held hostage by cybersquatters, the most important one being waldenbooks.com. At the time the waldenbooks.com domain was shown to be registered by one Greg Ricks of Louisiana. A small bit of online research showed Greg Ricks to be a real person. I approached my boss at the time and suggested that Borders register the gregricks.com domain name, with the idea that two can play that game. In the year and a half since Borders registered the gregricks.com domain, I’ve kept track of the ownership to see if my theory would hold — that Mr. Greg Ricks would finally tire of being a squatter and offer up a trade. During one of my periodical domain name checks of the whois database, I noticed that the two domains swapped hands. And also that Mr. Greg Ricks snapped up gregricks.net and gregricks.org. Ha!

So, the above theory may or may not work with individual cybersquatters who are possibly only out to make a quick buck, but what can you do about companies like Mailbank and BuyDomains who register large amounts of domains and then try to either sell them to the highest bidder or try to sell services around them? You may have to take a slightly different tack, like registering a domain name that’s a typo of that company. I own a couple domains that I’m using to test this theory. We’ll see if I’m right. In the meantime, I get to read lots of mis-directed email for said companies. People make lots of typos! Heh!